We didn't think it would actually come to this, but Congress is moving forward with a plan to heartlessly cut food stamp benefits.

That is especially bad news for so many New Yorkers who live in a city where Wall Street executives take home six-figure bonuses, and they must decide daily between paying ever-rising rents and other bills or feeding their kids.

Many of those New Yorkers – our neighbors – relied on a federal subsidy of just a couple hundred dollars a month to make sure that they could close the gap between the food that they could afford to buy and the amount of food they actually need to feed their families.

And, unfortunately, the problem of hunger in New York City is getting worse, not better, even as a struggling economy makes a slow recovery.

Recent reports show that more and more New Yorkers – approximately 1 in 5 - are relying on food pantries and soup kitchens for meals, not because they've hit hard times, but because the income disparity in this city of embarrassing riches means that they haven't just fallen on hard times, they are stuck there and can't get up.

So now Congress moves forward with even more devastating cuts, as if the people who rely on that extra help see it as a cash cow and are too lazy to find a way off the federal welfare rolls. That is simply not the reality; they need more help, not less.

It doesn't look like New York City is going to get any help from the federal government, so it looks like it is going to be up to the de Blasio administration to address the issue. If he is really serious about ending the “Tale of Two Cities” he rode so hard during his campaign, making sure that the most vulnerable people in our city have at the very least enough to eat every day.